7 Fat Burning & Training Tips – Tight Now!

There are 3 parts to this post: 1) The ‘if you are in a rush’ version. 2) The detailed version with plenty of… reasons… 3) And, the answers to those voices in your head.

If you are in too much of a rush to read it all:

1) Breakfast = Protein, good fat and veg/salad. Do it.
2) Girls, lift weights because it will help you burn fat and get lean. Do it.
3) The right juice (when you blend it with whole veg/leaves for fibre) can enhance your life. Do it.
4) Love the training you do so you stick at it.
5) Drink tea. The right tea (no milk no sugar, no soy)
6) Train & Eat at the right time for your body
7) Have massages. Regularly. Your body and mind need them.

The Detailed Version:

Tip 1 is Breakfast / Desayuno

Breakfast!!!!! It is THIS important!
You might hear a little voice that says: “but, I can’t eat much in the morning… but I like granola / muesli… but I don’t have time to cook in the morning…”
(answers to all of these voices are at the bottom of this post, funnily enough in the ‘answers’ section)

Breakfast Provoked Life lesson – if you want anything badly enough you will find a way to make it happen. That goes for money, goals, feeling good and fat burning – You will make it happen if you want it badly enough.

BONUS BENEFIT (for everyone!)
When you eat a protein, good fat, veg/salad breakfast you will find that your mood stays more stable. Less and less spikes and crashes in energy, more and more rational thoughts and good feelings. It’s true it works do it. I was a MOODY teenager because I was overweight and eating TOO MUCH SUGAR (sugar from lactose from milk & dairy, from wheat, dried fruit and plenty of refined sugars). Are you moody? Do you get mood swings and are you ‘short’ with people? Sort your breakfast out now to help you burn fat and stay stable. Getting a decent hit of protein in your breakfast releases dopamine in your brain too. Dopamine is the same chemical that is released when you feel love (and strangely enough take hard drugs) to make you feel good. Winner!

STOP READING! Right, let’s get real. Seriously, stop everything. Forget about the rest of this post, your breakfast is where you start. If your breakfast is perfect and your mood stable then AWESOME job! If not, write down, or better still DO the thing that’s going to change your breakfast. Cook some chicken breasts right now for tomorrow, buy some cans of tuna and salad. Get some organic raw Almonds. I want you to do this for me and your friends so I we don’t have to tolerate your mood swings, and because I want you to enjoy awesome energy levels and feel great!

Tip 2 is for Girls

OH NO! I’m a girl and I’m scared of getting bulky like a man!!
You wont get bulky unless you want to get bulky. Do you know how much work and effort it takes to get genuine, strong lean muscle? Even if someone is smashing growth hormone or steroids it would still take a very awesome training program with an even more awesome eating regime to add lean muscle mass.

If you want a tight bum, sleek obliques and firm bingo wings (the back of your arm) then start lifting. Get a high quality, highly motivated and exciting personal trainer (or one that works well with your personality) and learn how to squat and train properly it will enhance your life. Ditch your trainer after 10 sessions if you have the motivation to keep learning and training independently. Like anything you want to do properly the more you learn the more there is to learn / and practice. Remember, not all trainers were created equally. Really. One will waste your time and take your money the other will transform your physical and emotional life (through feeling great!) which in turn will help you earn more money (if you want to).

Tip 3 is Add the fibre

JUICE can be good & it can be kind of ‘BAD’
If it’s the right juice and is part of a HIGH protein diet then it can be (kind of) part of your fat burning breakfast if you love it. Having spent 24 hours with Richie Watson, an awesome guy who healed himself of ME through raw food and juicing, and a lot of time with Jeff DePeron Hollywood personal trainer to the stars, I’ve come to realise that the high density of nutrients in a juice is like a potent and natural medicine. The KEY thing is part juicing, part blending. Juice a load of leaves and veg, stick 1/2 an apple or some pineapple in there for sweetness then blend it with a big hit of leaves and whole veg (fibre slows the release of sugar into your blood). If you struggle with burning fat or are overweight then drinking juice (a lot of natural sugar) breakfast is the not a great idea and could hinder your fat burning potential to begin. (If you’re going to juice or already juicing read this next part with eyes wide open!)

HOWEVER, (which is just a fancy butt), with that said, juicing is AWESOME and it can have a prominent place in your diet because of the high concentration of nutrients and vitamins that are found in juice. When I or the ‘foodies’ speak about juicing they’re talking about organic fresh veg that you juice yourself. Not the stuff available in your local supermarket in a bottle/box – it’s different. Much of that stuff is pasturized which kills many of the nutrients, and it could have been sitting there for weeks which means eve less nutrients.

When you get a huge hit of nutrients (vitamins, minerals and antioxidants) they literally go to work on fixing your body.

For arguments sake if you didn’t see the juice in it’s form as a vegetable/fruit then avoid it. See tip 6 for more on this.

Tip 4 is Love

LOVE IT. If you don’t you wont (stick at it).
I’ve said it before I will say it many many times again. If you are repulsed by the idea of going to the gym and training then find something else (martial arts, dancing, sprinting, a sport, swimming) something, anything. You can enjoy and feel good about the way you get and stay healthy.

Tip 5 is Tea

DRINK TEA!
This is one thing that we can literally copy from the Japanese. (Not the soy thing. That’s FAR to complicated and dangerous. Find out more here)

Why drink tea?
– The stimulant effect in tea is much more balanced (because of the theanine) and gradual (both coming up and coming down). AWESOME video on the potent Matcha Tea here.
– Tea is FULL of goodness – wether it helps digestion (Pu’er), has antioxidants (high in Matcha & greens) or gives you energy.

PS. Organic coffee can work well for some people. Others (like me) it will make anxious and irritable. Find out if your coffee is screwing up your life. Take 2 weeks off Coffee / all stimulants and see how you feel.

(when you try a few weeks without coffee, ‘builders tea’ or other artificially caffeinated beverages you should expect some headaches and funny withdrawal feelings)

If you want to learn about tea, I mean REALLY learn the good stuff then get to The Tea Smith in Spitalfields Market, London and get involved with one of John’s Tea Master classes. Before I interviewed him (see first clip here) I thought I was a smart arse knowing that teas need different steeping temperatures. Turns out that I knew NOTHING before that interview. (Great job John! Thank you).

Tip 6 is ‘Fat-burning O’clock’

Train & Eat at ‘FAT-BURNING OCLOCK’

This is a blurry one. The key turning point for me and for my clients is when they ‘tune in’ to their body. I’m going to suggest that you need to get in tune with your body as soon as possible and find out (feel) when your body is most receptive to burning fat. If I have a photo shoot or want to lean up for whatever reason I will do high intensity interval training in the morning before breakfast, drinking just a little green tea pre-workout.

BONUS BENEFIT: When you’re in tune with your body and how it works life seems to flow much more easily. That oh so hippy saying ‘mind body connection’ is very real and the sooner you figure out how to connect your mind and body the better your life is going to be.

Tip 7 is Massages

GET MASSAGES.

For 2 reasons:
a) Your body needs to be worked on, mental and physical stresses (walking, training, talking and of course listening) take their toll on your body. You need to have massages as often as your budget allows (or trade swop like me – train someone in exchange for a massage)

b) When was the last time you had someones hands on your body? Here comes the hippy talk – we need human connection, physical and mental. It nourishes us. Even if it is a paid masseuse (steady…) There is this thing called ‘failure to thrive’ when a baby is not given human contact and affection in the first few weeks of it’s life. A similar thing happens to us as adults. We need connection.

Tip 7b is HIIT (of course)

Conclusion:

All of the tips above are awesome. They work. Remember they are an a scale where some people will get better results from certain methods depending on how much training you have already done and how healthy/damaged your body is (from the inside out).

The best advice anyone can give you about coming super healthy is to always be learning and asking questions and make sure the thing you are going to try wont kill you, then experiment with it!

If you’re in London (England), Melbourne (Aus), LA or Colombia (Medellin & Bogota) there are people I will happily recommend to you for training and massages. Send me a message Rich(AT)RichEats.TV about that.

1) Butt, I cant eat in the morning before work… Well, for 99% of people (you’re probably not the 1%) who are looking to burn fat you’re going to have to. There is this awesome concept I learned through ME (Metabolic Effect) called ‘Pre-emptive Eating’. In short you eat the RIGHT breakfast foods (organic, lean protein + nuts and veg/salad) even if you don’t want to BECAUSE you will make better food choices later, trigger the right hormones creating a healthy metabolism and help build muscle (which you want because while we are burning all of this fat we are going to have to put something back in there to fill out all that skin and bone!)

2)Butt, I don’t have time in the morning…
The answer is in your question: Do it the night before. Easy. Boil 6 eggs on Monday and eat 2 per day for 3 days. Cook 4 chicken breasts in the oven (you can do something else while they cook! oh yes!) and eat 1 per day for 4 days. Same goes for fish!

3)Butt, I like granola / muesli…
Granola & muesli (and oatmeal/porridge) all process in the body in a very similar way to sugar. They provoke similar fat storing hormones. When you eat sugar, unless it is burned off through vigorous exercise it is stored as fat (and has a (detrimental) party with your organs and mental stability. Seriously.

And! that’s aside from the very important point that Robb Wolf and Loren Cordain make, which is that oats, grains (amongst other commons foods) cause HUGE problems for our digestive system (and thus our body and mind)